House Rule: Cumulative Death Saving Throws

I’ve been spending some of quarantine finally getting into Critical Role while I search for new material to stream while I’m working from home. I’m still early on in Campaign One, so I don’t know the specifics of this rule or if it’s ever specified, but in a fairly major combat a character goes down and fails two death saving throws before they are brought up with healing magic and Matt says something about keeping those two failed saves and it got me thinking – I kind of like that idea for a grittier, slightly more lethal version of 5th Edition, and I want to spitball an idea I had here for a house rule for death saves.

Now please note that I have not had the chance to playtest this – so please keep that in mind while reading it. That said I present to you:

Cumulative Death Saving Throws

As written, whenever you gain any hit points, the number of death saving throws you have rolled, both successes and failures resets to 0. With this house rule, you keep the failures you accrue until you take a short rest, similar to how Pathfinder 2e has the Dying and Wounded conditions. If you fail one death saving throw and then are brought back to consciousness by the cleric, but go down later in that battle or the next one, you start that clock with one failed save and failing two more will mean that your character dies – it certainly would heighten the tension if the front line fighter with two failed death saves already falls in combat.

Failed death saves are reduced to 0 when you complete a short rest. If you don’t have the time to take a short rest, you can “buy off” failed death saves by taking one level of exhaustion per failed save you have. Exhaustion is a wonderful mechanic that I feel the designers kind of forgot about. There are precious few things that seem to interact with it in the core rules.

So what do you think? Is there something that I missed? Anything you’d change? Let me know!